Well hello there
Mirage Realms has gone through a few iterations over the years. It started as a solo project I was working on in an effort to *actually create and release something* using MS and by pinching features from all over the place I sorta managed to begin to get somewhere. Back in those days I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag and soon after Jacob joined and things started to take off.
Well, lots of RL stuff happened and Jacob and Egon took on the project by themselves, I became a Junior Java Developer and many years passed. Jacob and Egon tired of working with Visual Basic and moved on in different directions.. the project died.
Three years of industry Java experience and lots of RL shit later and I've decided to write my own game, this time from scratch using Java. I've written my own networking because I'm an idiot, implemented MySQL object persistence using a hibernate layer and got a shit tonne of things done that you can't screenshot and nobody cares about
Anyway, about a month ago I got to the stage where you could create an account, login, create your characters and enter the realm.
I then got to work on a basic ingame UI that would 'do for the moment'. The issue here was primarily that OpenGL and Swing fucking hate each other, so after a lot of effort and faffing around, this eventually went into the bin.
(big image so just linked)
http://slick.javaunlimited.net/download/file.php?id=75
After looking into a 3rd party library called TWL and after lots of trial and error, I came up with a decent(ish) basic UI design that worked dynamically as you would expect. I implemented a basic chat system and started pulling everything together...
I did some research into another library called Slick and began working with it, the very first 'test' client was put together. The actual game itself was not networked at all at this point, and I had no idea how I was going to do any of the mapping or anything like that.
Lets fast forward to today as it was a very productive three weeks. There is now a map system in place (maps can be as big as 250x250 currently, I am looking to extend this later) that works as you would expect it, the server has map files and the client connects and downloads them as required. The 'engine' (I guess) is fully scrolling and is now completely networked up, you can run around and bump into other players as well as blocked tiles etc.
This weekend I have implemented the map switching system that stitches maps together much as MS did, if you run off the edge of a map that is linked to another one, you'll magically appear on the right hand side of the new map. Just this evening I have written some camera handling that ensures as you run up to the edge of a map the view stops scrolling, much tidier. Of course, along side the client and server development now exists the map editor.
Anyway, I hope this post has been informative and given you a catch-up as to what I have been doing for the last few months. A much fuller, more detailed and ongoing development blog can be found at www.mirage-realms.com should you be interested in the project
Cheers peeps,
Liam
